There's a Senegalese expression that goes, "There are forty kinds of lunacy, but only one kind of common sense."
The outcome of this general principle is that trying to support pseudoscientific claims sometimes forces alliances between groups you'd never think would have anything in common -- such as the cryptozoologists and the young-Earth creationists teaming up to find evidence of the "Mokèlé-Mbèmbé," a water-dwelling beastie that supposedly lives in the Congo River Basin.
The first written account of the Mokèlé-Mbèmbé seems to be from science writer (and cryptozoology buff) Willy Ley in his 1941 book The Lungfish and the Unicorn, but his description was (he said) taken from an unpublished report written by German military officer and explorer Ludwig Freiherr von Stein zu Lausnitz, who was summarizing sightings by natives he'd spoken to in Cameroon. Here's what Ley had to say:
The animal is said to be of a brownish-gray color with a smooth skin, its size is approximately that of an elephant; at least that of a hippopotamus. It is said to have a long and very flexible neck and only one tooth but a very long one; some say it is a horn. A few spoke about a long, muscular tail like that of an alligator. Canoes coming near it are said to be doomed; the animal is said to attack the vessels at once and to kill the crews but without eating the bodies. The creature is said to live in the caves that have been washed out by the river in the clay of its shores at sharp bends. It is said to climb the shores even at daytime in search of food; its diet is said to be entirely vegetable. This feature disagrees with a possible explanation as a myth. The preferred plant was shown to me, it is a kind of liana with large white blossoms, with a milky sap and apple-like fruits. At the Ssombo River I was shown a path said to have been made by this animal in order to get at its food. The path was fresh and there were plants of the described type nearby. But since there were too many tracks of elephants, hippos, and other large mammals it was impossible to make out a particular spoor with any amount of certainty.
So already we're talking about a third-hand account; Ley recounting what he'd read that von Stein had written about what natives told him. Ley also quotes one Lieutenant Paul Gratz, who is not a lot more convincing:
The crocodile is found only in very isolated specimens in Lake Bangweulu, except in the mouths of the large rivers at the north. In the swamp lives the Nsanga, much feared by the natives, a degenerate saurian which one might well confuse with the crocodile were it not that its skin has no scales and its toes are armed with claws. I did not succeed in shooting a Nsanga, but on the island of Mbawala I came by some strips of its skin.
Ley says that the Mokèlé-Mbèmbé and the Nsanga are the same, which I guess is true because it's very likely that neither one is real. Skeptic Donald Prothero dismisses alleged sightings of the Mokèlé-Mbèmbé as being either crocodiles, black rhinos, or simply overactive imaginations, and I'm inclined to agree with him. The only alleged photograph of the beast, taken by explorer Rory Nugent in 1985, is almost certainly a distant snapshot of a floating log.
So the whole thing would be in the same category as Bigfoot and Nessie and Mothman et al. -- but then the creationists got involved.
Scottish explorer and young-Earth creationist William Gibson funded and led two expeditions into the Congo River Basin to try to prove the Mokèlé-Mbèmbé exists, although how this would support creationism is beyond me. Maybe it's because the creationists have asserted for years that humans coexisted with dinosaurs, and that the dinosaurs went extinct because they all missed getting on the Ark or something, so having one around today would mean we still coexist. Q.E.D.
Hey, don't yell at me. I'm not claiming it makes sense, I'm just telling you about it.
In general, it's hard to see how the existence of "living fossils," organisms long thought to be extinct that have proven to be very much alive -- the coelacanth inevitably comes to mind -- is any kind of cogent argument against evolution, but the sad fact is that your average creationist wouldn't know a logical train of thought if it came up and bit them on the ass. Be that as it may, the creationists are all in on the Mokèlé-Mbèmbé, with the general consensus being if one is discovered, all the evolutionary biologists will retreat in disarray and immediately join evangelical Christian churches.
So we have here a case of strange bedfellows -- the cryptozoologists, who are generally well-meaning even if they have a different standard for what constitutes reliable evidence than I do, are on the same team as the young-Earth creationists, who by and large want to turn the entire world into an autocratic Christian theocracy.
Me, I think it'd be cool if Mokèlé-Mbèmbé existed, but purely because it'd be a fascinating new area of biological study. Sadly, the fact that there's exactly zero evidence other than hearsay (which, after all, isn't really evidence at all) argues against it. For those of you who were hoping for confirmation of a Brachiosaurus lumbering around in the Congo Basin, I'm afraid it's kind of a non-starter.
And that goes double for those of you who think Adam and Eve had a pet velociraptor.
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